Prove You're Human

Zilan Qian is a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.

The lifecycle of AI, from training to output, has tangled itself around the lives of Chinese illustrators in ways that run in opposite directions.1 The machine was fed their work, learned their expressions, and is now displacing them. And in the process, it has forced them to answer a question that no one expected to become that urgent a few years ago: how do you prove you are human?

The answer, so far, involves courtrooms, livestreams, and job markets. It involves regulatory regimes that strictly govern AI outputs but stay lenient on the inputs, a community that hunts for signs of AI in each other’s work and demands live drawing…